by Jane Haddam
“No,” the voice said. “It’s all right. Put the rose centerpiece with the swans, just the way the plan calls for, but put them all with the pâtés, and that way we don’t have to worry about Charlotte having another fit. And don’t cry. It’s useless to cry about the way Charlotte behaves. She’s a spoiled brat.”
“Charlotte,” Susan said. “That’s Charlotte Deacon Ross. She’s right there. And Michael is there too. We could have sent a nice little package in with him, and nobody would have known—”
“Of course they would have known,” Kathi said. “They probably have X-ray machines, out of sight, so that the guests don’t notice. They probably have all kinds of security.”
“Maybe we should just gag Charlotte and lock her in a closet,” the voice on the receiver said. “God only knows, that’s the only way we’re getting through until midnight without my killing her. Or worse.”
Kathi turned the receiver down, again. “We’re supposed to make a transcript. We’ll make a transcript. Michael is supposed to find out what they’re going to be up to next. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and they’ll have a ritual right there in the open, and we’ll get it all on tape.”
“I don’t care how reasonable you think you are,” Susan said. “You’re going to have to use them sometimes. You can’t just keep them here in your living room forever.”
“Make a transcript,” Kathi said.
Then she retreated into the front hall, where it was quiet, a claustrophobic space not even large enough to hold a little table. Michael had warned them all about people who tried to push the organization into ill-considered violence. They were almost always enemy agents, pilot fish for the shock troops whose only purpose was to destroy little groups just like this one. If Susan was a pilot fish, they would have to find a way to get rid of her—move the meeting places, change the phone numbers, hide the mailing lists. They wouldn’t hide the literature, because as far as Michael was concerned, the more people who saw the literature the better. Even some of Them might be convinced, or enlightened, or deprogrammed, by reading the truth about who and what they were.
Still, no matter how enormously satisfied Kathi would be if it turned out that Susan was one of Them, the fact was that she was telling the simple truth. They would have to use the explosives some day. They even intended to, and there were a lot more of them than Susan realized. In this house alone, there were at least two-dozen small cluster bombs, made of dynamite and grenades bought on the military hardware black market, any one of which could destroy a store the size of an ordinary 7-Eleven in a couple of seconds flat. There were other things too, bits and pieces of things that could be put together to make a bigger bang than any single piece could do, if you didn’t care too much about precision or accuracy or being able to recognize the target when the mission was over. Then there were the weapons, the ones Michael had shown Kathi how to shoot: Soviet military issue, most of them, bought over the Internet, sent to an address without a real name attached to it, stockpiled in another state. Timothy McVeigh had been an idiot to rely on a fertilizer bomb. He could have done three times the damage if he had known how to go about doing what he was doing.
If the World Trade Center attacks had been for real, instead of for show, they wouldn’t have been carried out with commercial airlines, and they wouldn’t have left those buildings standing for an hour after the explosions went off. The Illuminati were sly. They knew what frightened people. They knew how to make people behave.
Kathi opened the front door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, the cold, the dark. In the middle of the city like this, it was impossible to see the sky. Someday, they would level all the cities. They would flatten all the tall buildings and grids of wires that shut out the stars and the sun and kept them all docile and ready for the kill, and America would be America again, perfect as it had been on the day it was founded, cleansed of all the evil that had come upon it since, the paper money, the multinational corporations, the bureaucrats with their agendas of “health” and “sanity” and tyranny and control.
All that would be gone, and Katy Davenport would be gone with it.
5
Ryall Wyndham had never understood how anybody, anywhere, could go about life haphazardly. It wasn’t just a question of money, although money counted. He could name two-dozen people in his class at Brown whose approach to money was a lot like their approach to cheeseburgers: Eat it up fast, before it had a chance to get away. None of them seemed to be able to wrap their minds around the idea that someday they would be old. They lived in a continuous present, and that present was filled with enough in the way of alcohol and drugs to addle God himself on a bad day. They were that way about women too, and that was worse. Ryall could remember a time when men worked very hard not to marry. Now they married all the time, for no reason at all, because it was Tuesday. They married women with money and women without it. They married women with background and women without it. Mostly, they seemed to marry women their parents wouldn’t approve of, as if that, and that alone, was enough to qualify a human female to be the mother of children. Ryall Wyndham did not have a wife, and he did not have children, and he did not expect to acquire either until the time was right. The time would be right when he could get one of these silly debutantes he escorted to all the best places to fall hideously, ridiculously in love with him.
The problem, he decided, checking out his tie in the mirror, was that the women he knew did not seem to go about life as haphazardly as the men he knew. Even the really ugly debutantes realized they were sitting on gold mines, and not just their crotches, either. God, he would love it, one day, to go in to one of those places and use a word like crotch. Or cunt. That was a good one. They really hated that one. They’d use words like crotch every once in a while just to show how down-to-earth and unaffected they were, but they’d never use a word like cunt, because it smelled of real vulgarity. The only people who could get away with real vulgarity were members of the Blood Royal. That was what all these people wanted to be, even though they’d never say so out loud. That was why they sent their children to those schools where the teachers worked overtime to instill true liberal guilt. The rich in America hate the poor everywhere in the world. The people of the Third World want only to rise up and throw off their capitalist oppressors and take on the mantle of vanguard communism for the new millennium. The real problem with this country is the Consumer Mentality. Oh, yes. Groton and St. Paul’s, Exeter and Choate. All those places positively despised the Consumer Mentality. It was just so damned tacky, and bad for you. McDonald’s hardened your arteries and ruined the landscape in pristine wildernesses from Maine to California. Television was a drug, meant to take your mind off Really Serious Things and keep you stupid and happy. Wal-Mart was the worst, because it not only did everything morally wrong, from refusing to carry emergency contraception to resisting the formation of workers’ unions, but it killed the very heart of America, the American small town. America had been a much better place when people had been forced to pay very high prices for bedsheets and electronics on their very own local Main Streets. Ryall was sure these people had seen a Main Street or two, once or twice in their lives. There was one in Stowe where they went to ski. There was another in Bar Harbor.
Tacky, tacky, tacky, Ryall thought. Then he closed his eyes and put his forehead against the mirror’s glass. He was very revved up, and he hadn’t even taken anything yet. He hated to medicate himself before he absolutely needed to. It was getting harder and harder for him to keep his mind on the subject when he went to one of these affairs, and yet everything—his whole life—depended on his remembering what he had seen and not writing it down until he was safely in the car and on the way home. Of course, he could cheat a little. He could find his way into the bathroom a couple of times every night and take out his notebook then, getting the details down before they disappeared forever from his head. It wasn’t as good as having the nearly total recall he’d had when he’d started, but it helped. The probl
em was that it had its natural limits. If he started hitting the bathroom every hour, rumors would be in full swing by the end of the night. They’d have him half-dead of AIDS or addicted to crack before he’d had a chance to file his column in the morning. That would be the end of everything. Reliability was the key. The women really weren’t as addled as their men. They kept their heads, and they kept their eyes on the main chance, and they weren’t about to jeopardize the only thing that mattered to them to hold on to a pudgy little dork whose only amusement value lay in his ability to get their names in the papers. There was a contradiction for you. The men really did things. They ran banks. They determined the economies of nations. The women did nothing but go to parties, and they were the ones with their names in the papers.
Ryall stepped back, reached around on his bureau top for his tape recorder, and switched it on. He really was pudgy, in the way unatheletic teenagers are pudgy. He was round and white and soft, like something that had lain for a long time in the water and bloated. He rubbed the side of his face. His fingers were stubby too. It didn’t make much of a difference that he was always careful to keep them very well-manicured.
“This is Ryall Wyndham reporting from the Around the World Harvest Ball, Philadelphia’s most talked-about event of the preChristmas social season.”
He switched the recorder off. Christ, he thought. He sounded like a Walter Winchell imitation in a forties movie. What was wrong with him these days? If he’d had more money, he could have been married ages ago. The problem was, he could never understand how to get money, and that in spite of the fact that he was very good at keeping it. He tried to imagine himself going in to work every day as a banker, and all he got was an image of Porky Pig in a bow tie. He had actually tried law school—at Georgetown, acceptable but not stel-lar—and lasted less than a month. He could still hear his old English teacher at Canterbury—one more time, acceptable but not stellar—telling him that he just didn’t have a knack for respectability. Respectability. He ought to go into one of these things wired sometime. That would blow the game to pieces in no time at all. He could just imagine the look on Charlotte Ross’s face when she heard her voice coming out of a little black box, screeching, “I’m not going to have some goddamned car salesman spilling drinks on me all night just because he’s got his own foundation.” Car salesman. That’s what Charlotte Ross called the Ford, who didn’t have the right kind of money.
Ryall got his cell phone, and switched it on, and punched in the numbers for his office. He hated to say that he “dialed” the cell phone, even though everybody did, because he so obviously didn’t dial it. A dial was round. He listened to the ring and checked out his cuff links while he waited. They were good gold cuff links, engraved, from Tiffany’s. In the position he was in, he could not afford to settle for the fake. They settled for it, though. It wasn’t only Barbara Bush who wore faux pearls in the daytime.
The phone was picked up on the other end. “Marilyn?” Ryall said. “You have a minute?”
“I thought you were supposed to be at that party.”
“The car is due in about fifteen minutes. Don’t worry. I won’t miss it. Did you do that thing I asked you to, about the records? You didn’t call back—”
“I haven’t had time to call back,” Marilyn said, sounding cross. “And yes, I did do it. I made triplicate copies too, in case you start losing them, which you always do. I don’t know why you bother to do research, really. You can never hang on to anything for longer than a day or two at a time. You’re really pathetic.”
“Yes. Well. I’m sorry to cause you so much distress. Did you happen to notice anything that was in the records?”
“No. Why should I? I’m not a gossip columnist, Ryall. I don’t really give a damn what these people do. I don’t think anybody does. I think the paper just keeps the column on because those people are investors, or something, and they like to get some publicity. I know I never read that stuff. Or Town and Country, either.”
“Yes.” You had to be patient with Marilyn. She was a very good assistant. She kept the appointment book meticulously. She did whatever research she was asked to do. She answered the phone without sounding as if she wanted to bite somebody’s head off. It was just that she was a … cunt.
“I don’t see what your problem is anyway,” she said. “I can’t figure out if you’re obsessed with Anthony van Wyck Ross or with his wife. And neither of them are anything to be obsessed about. I mean, really.”
“Anthony van Wyck Ross is one of the most successful bankers on the planet,” Ryall said. “Get your head out of the social columns for a moment. He’s got more money than God. He determines monetary policy for half the world. Oh, not officially, of course, officially we’ve got all these government agencies. But in reality, that’s how it works.”
“Maybe. Who cares? And what do you need his transcripts from Yale and Harvard Law School for? I mean, truly, even if there was some kind of huge scandal, who would care? It’s not as if he’s Steven Spielberg.”
“You don’t think anybody would care if one of the most important men on earth was involved in something less than honest?”
“No. I don’t even think they’d be surprised. Well, they might be interested if he killed his wife, or she killed him. I don’t suppose you could arrange for that?”
“If they wanted to kill each other, they’d hire hitmen. And not the kind who get caught.”
“Nobody cares about those people anymore. They’re not relevant to real people’s lives. And don’t give me that thing about running the world, because it doesn’t matter if they do. They don’t run my world.”
“You wouldn’t think that if they took it into their heads to shut down the newspaper and you were out on your ear looking for a job.”
“I don’t think anybody would just take it into his head to shut down the newspaper. That’s not the way it works, Ryall. Come into the real world for a time—pretty funny, considering your name. Do people make that joke on your name all the time?”
“No,” Ryall said. “And we’ve had this conversation before. Never mind. As long as you have the material. I’ll come in tomorrow and look it over. Although God only knows, I hate to come in to the office after one of these things. I always have a hangover.”
“It’s like that Enron thing,” Marilyn said. “It was a big scandal, and a big deal in all the newspapers, and it was on CNN and TV for months, but nobody really paid attention. Why should they? It’s just a business thing. It’s not as if they’re—”
“—Steven Spielberg—”
“—Madonna.”
“That’s the car,” Ryall said. “As long as you have them. Put them somewhere safe. I don’t want them getting lost.”
“I never lose anything,” Marilyn said, which was true. She never forgot appointments, either. Ryall was sure that, if she had been alive at the time, she would have been the one person in her class who would have remembered all her homework on the day after the Kennedy assassination. He knew for a fact that the events of September 11 hadn’t fazed her for a moment.
“They’ll be in your private drawer,” she said. “I’ve even taken the care to lock it, since you’ve been so paranoid. But if you ask me, you’re behaving like a lunatic.”
“The car,” Ryall said. Then he switched the cell phone off and put it down. The car wasn’t really here, not yet, and wouldn’t be for a while. He still had to find all his paraphernalia: his money clip; his wallet; his card case; his key ring; his Swiss army knife. The Swiss army knife was made of sterling silver and accented with gold. It was the kind of thing that impressed people like Marilyn.
“Crap, crap, crap,” Ryall said to the air. He didn’t want to spend the night at this party. He didn’t want to file a story about it with the paper and then with Town and Country. He didn’t want to feel like Porky Pig anymore, so that right in the middle of any moment when he was able to think of himself as winning, the image would pop up on the back of his eyelids like
a computer virus and there he would be, squat and round, with a little curly tail sticking out of the back of his best tuxedo pants.
“Crap, crap, crap,” he said again. Then he swept all his things off the top of his bureau and headed out his bedroom door and down the stairs.
6
Lucinda Watkins had been born and raised a Baptist in a world where the most exotic “other” religion belonged to the Catholics at St. Mary of the Fields, and there weren’t many of them. “The preachers say they worship the devil,” Lucinda’s grandmother had said, “but I don’t believe it.” And because Grandma Watkins hadn’t believed it, Lucinda hadn’t believed it, either. In the end, everything that had ever happened to Lucinda had come down to Grandma Watkins, who had taken their residence in Mount Hope, Mississippi, as a kind of purgatory come early, except that she hadn’t believed in purgatory. God was getting them ready for something special. She believed in that. The long back roads that got so hot in the summer they were nothing but dirt, the “schoolhouse” that was nothing but a shack at the edge of a cotton field that had been leached clean of nutrients before the Home War, the good jobs cleaning up in the brick houses along White Jasmine Drive that went to black people and not to them—it was all preparation, all rehearsal, for something they were supposed to do later.
“They think they’re rich, the people in those houses,” Grandma Watkins had told Lucinda one afternoon when Lucinda had come to walk her back after a long day’s work at the diner. “It isn’t true. I’ve been to Atlanta to visit my cousin. Those are the rich people.”
Lucinda hadn’t had the faintest idea what Grandma meant. The people on White Jasmine Drive looked rich enough to her. Not only were their driveways paved and their houses made of brick, but they had cars parked out front and black people to clean up after them. Lucinda held on to the thought anyway. She never lost the conviction that Grandma Watkins was right about everything, from rich people to heaven, and she never would. It was why she didn’t talk slang, like everybody else she knew, not even in front of other poor people. Grandma wouldn’t say ain’t to save her life. Even at work, where white trash were supposed to play an elaborate ritual straight out of a bad MGM screenplay and central casting, Grandma Watkins sounded like she’d just been graduated from Miss Hellman’s School for Young Ladies. Sometimes she didn’t even sound southern.